“You are Nephilim: a human-angel hybrid forged to defend humanity with supernatural powers. Fight solo or with a friend to annihilate demons and challenge brutal bosses in relentless melée combat. Rise, violent one. The prophecy is yours to fulfill.” – Steam Description

Crimson Moon is a 3rd-person Souls-like roguelike. You are a Nephilim; Fight the enemies of heaven to reclaim the city of Gildenarch, overtaken by vampires, undead, and demons. Do this by discovering and adding equipment to your ever-growing arsenal to make your perfect build. While discovering your build, you will create a bloody path of carnage through the city to reach your goal. If you fall, get up again and again. There is a little bit of a story to follow as well; you are born of the sin of angels having children to make

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Chose Thy Equipment

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The game starts by giving you basic equipment to start your first run with: a simple sword and shield, a two-handed weapon, a ring, an amulet, and a full set of armor. Each piece of armor, sword, or amulet gives you passive and active buffs to help you progress through every run.

Once you have completed your first run, the player loses all their equipment and starts back with the base equipment. Walking over to the loadout menu reveals that you have saved the equipment you have brought out of the run and can create better builds using the passives of each weapon. Each item starts at common rarity and progresses from common, uncommon, rare, and epic. By using the blacksmith’s upgrade system, you can increase the rarity of your starting gear, making the next run easier.

The game does the roguelike system very well; the boons and upgrade system keep the game fun and interesting. Each boon has a variety of different benefits for the player. Some boons make sprint attacks set people, while others increase physical damage, and my favorite heals the player up to 40% health passively without needing any healing, allowing one to keep going.

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Souls-Like?

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Crimson Moon does the roguelike aspect of the game really well, so the question is: how does it do on the combat side… not great. When it comes to the Souls-like part of the game, it falls short. Rolling feels off, attacking feels weird, and parrying enemy attacks doesn’t work very well. The entire combat system feels very clunky and off-putting if you have played hundreds of hours of Souls-likes, so take this all with a grain of salt. Then there was the enemy design; some enemies are super easy, while others would be way too hard for just a normal fight. Grunt enemies would just sit there and get hit after the first attack, not doing anything to get out of the way or attack back. Bigger enemies would spam moves over and over to the point where it became a dodging match while attempting to get a parry in to stop the onslaught. At no point could you get a hit in.

Now the AI is not all bad; let’s talk bosses. The boss AI falls into a perfect category between not doing anything like grunts and spamming everything like mid-tier enemies. Each boss felt really good to fight and not so overbearing, making the fight feel fair. Each one also had really unique designs, making them one of the highlights for the normal enemy AI.

Crimson Moon does something very interesting with the combat called Angelic Transformation. The player is both human and angel, giving them the special ability to turn into an angel after filling up a bar at the bottom of the screen. Once turned, the player can carve their way through any army, dealing massive damage while in this form.

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Let’s address the Controls

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Sadly, the combat is not where this story ends. Controls are also a huge issue in the game; previously, you could not rebind keys. If you’re stuck with something you don’t like, you just have to deal with it. In addition, you couldn’t change the camera sensitivity. This was a huge issue at launch but, as of September 3^rd, they released a patch with these changes, fixing a huge problem. A secondary issue is the camera in general, not just the sensitivity. If you are fighting a big enemy, the camera would glitch out and fall into the ground or spin around in a circle really fast. If you were fighting a fast enemy, then you could expect the camera to have a hard time following them before they could get an attack off. The dev team stated in the September 3^rd patch that they are working on fixing the camera.

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Now that we’ve talked: What does a run look like?

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A full run looks something like this: picking out your loadout that has the abilities, boons, and equipment you want, and then stepping through a portal. Each run then starts in Mission I, where you will choose between 2 areas to make your way through. Each area has 4 levels with a boss at the very end to fight and defeat. You then move on to Mission II with 4 levels and a boss; this continues all the way up to Mission V, which I have yet to reach. If you die, you then go all the way back to Mission I and lose all your boons and equipment you have gained along the way. The game makes this a little easier by allowing you to revive multiple times in a run, gaining more revives as you level up. After death, you can then unlock more equipment and try again and again, reaching higher and higher.

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• Graphics– The Graphics for the game are really something; you can tell there was a lot of thought put into each level design. Each level and the hub area have this feeling you’re looking at an old Gothic church in its prime. The enemies also have unique designs that feel lovingly crafted.
• Gameplay– The gameplay is the weakest part of this whole game at the moment. It attempts to do what is expected from a Souls-like but just misses the mark on every point. Attacking doesn’t feel great; dodging doesn’t feel great, and parrying an enemy’s attacks doesn’t work a good portion of the time. I could see them fixing these issues and ending up with a really fun and interesting game.
• Sound– The sound design is really good. The best part of it has to be the hub music. While standing in the hub, you can hear what sounds like a church choir singing with instrumentals behind it for a beautiful temple feel.
• Controls– Controls are what to expect from Souls-likes; the only difference from other games in the same category is the little boons and abilities the player can use.
• Story– The story is not the main focus of the game, but there is a little bit of a story. The beginning cutscene as well as several conversations with the characters will start to flesh out the lore of the world. If you’re into reading, there are lore pages scattered throughout each level for you to collect and bring back to the lore master in the hub.